Some discoveries about alloy reactions during the production of metallic
Fe from (Mg,Fe)O at High-Pressure High-Temperature
Abstract
It is reported that metallic iron may exist under shallow lower mantle
conditions (Frost et al., 2004). If metallic iron exists, it has an
important chemical and physical impact on lower mantle materials. In our
previous High-pressure High-temperature experiments, metallic iron was
successfully formed in (Mg,Fe)O. However, when we used different
metal-oxygen fugacity buffers, it was found that the generated metallic
iron existed in the form of alloy. Iron-rich alloys with different
compositions even have different physical forms, such as granular and
dendritic shapes. In the actual lower mantle, metallic iron produced
from (Mg,Fe)O may also form alloys when encountering ferrous metals, and
the physical and chemical properties of metallic iron are very different
from those of alloys. Therefore the formation of iron-rich alloys is
worth our attention. In this study, different metal-oxygen fugacity
buffers (Cr, Ti, TIC) were used to study the formation of iron-rich
alloy in (Mg, Fe) O under high temperature (1573k, 1773K) and high
pressure (3GPa, 15GPa). When the oxygen fugacity is lower than a certain
level, metallic iron is formed, and due to the existence of metal-oxygen
fugacity buffers, the formed metallic iron will be alloyed with the
around metal-oxygen fugacity buffers. At the same time, a reaction zone
appears between the sample zone and oxygen fugacity buffers. Martirosyan
et al. (2016) also found similar experimental results. We measured the
alloy composition and content, the left composition of ((Mg, Fe) O) and
oxygen fugacity buffers around the sample area to understand the
formation process of iron-rich alloys in our experiments. Preliminary
results will be displayed and their implications discussed.